Had enough yet?*2

Have you heard? A bunch of government school employees in Atlanta got caught cheating. They were boosting the grades of their students. Why would they do such a thing? Doesn’t it seem like giving kids better grades than they actually achieved would hurt the kids instead of help them? They did it for money of course. They don’t care about the kids. Oh yes, that’s always what they say to the public. “We need more money, it’s for the kids.”, “We need more vacation time, it’s for the kids”, “We need smaller classrooms, it’s for the kids”, “We need more benefits, it’s for the kids”. I just puked a little bit writing this.

This is what you get when you have a government school system. Corruption. This is what you’ll always get when you have a government school system. It’s unavoidable. Here’s a quote from the AP, “more than a year after prosecutors indicted 35 staffers in a school cheating scandal that shocked the national education community.” You’ve got to have a special kind of naivety to be shocked by this. The incentives are there. Boost the kids scores and get more funding. Hey, if you can’t actually teach them just give them good grades anyway. And poof, the money from the federal government rolls in.

You’re willfully ignorant if you don’t think every school district in the country is doing this to some extent. This group just happened to be blatant about it.

This here takes the cake. Here’s a quote from an article at the huffington post. “Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, blamed “test-crazed” education policies in sharp comments released Tuesday regarding a massive standardized-test cheating scandal in Atlanta.”

Does this bitch, Randi Weingarten, think she’s somehow standing outside the situation looking in. The teachers unions are the number one policy makers for the government school system. Read my article here about teachers unions. They are the most powerful lobbying group when it comes to the government schools. Parents have no say. The teachers unions buy the politicians and write the legislation.

It’s always some excuse with these people. Maybe they should write some more legislation. That ought to fix it. Or maybe it was just a few bad apples. How many times do we have to hear that excuse? Apparently, there’s always just another group of bad apples. It’s never the system in their minds. They don’t want to even suggest that because the easy money would stop flowing to them. This woman, Randi Weingarten, draws a huge salary to make the lives of children, parents, and pretty much everyone a living nightmare. She doesn’t want to give that up. Throwing a few under the bus occasionally is usually enough to appease the peasants. I get it, the peasants are easily appeased. Someone got punished. That ought to end the problem. Give me a break.

So, tax money pays the cheating teachers. Tax money pays to prosecute a few of the cheating teachers. Tax money pays for the defense of the cheating teachers. Repeat. And always does the tax money flow to them no matter the scandal. This is government.

Okay smarty, why doesn’t this happen at private schools? Private schools are held accountable by the parents because parents pay for it. The incentives are directly tied to results. The results being the actual education of the kids. If the kids aren’t learning anything, but they keep bringing home good grades or good test scores, the parent are going to pull their kids out of that school. It’s an immediate loss of funding, not the other way around. The private schools have every incentive to make sure the kids are actually learning.

At a government school if the kids aren’t learning, but the fake high test scores are sent to the government, the government approves or increases that schools funding. What can the parents do about it? Most of the time they are tied to a school or school district. They can complain. Does that do anything? Maybe after a long while, investigations, etc. The damaging behavior continues in the mean time. Maybe nothing ever comes of the investigation. After all, it’s another government agency doing the investigating. It has to be seriously blatant for these schools to ever get caught or punished. It’s nearly impossible to prove they were doing anything wrong. The staff is working hard and doing their best don’t you know. And of course, the teachers unions always have their backs.

The lucky ones can get out of the government school system altogether. The government makes that extremely difficult though. The people are intentionally impoverished so they are forced to use the governments school system among other reasons. Read my series Government Schools Suck.